OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Reactive and Efficient Walking Pattern Generator for Robust Bipedal Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

Available possibilities to prevent a biped robot from falling down in the presence of severe disturbances are mainly Center of Pressure (CoP) modulation, step location and timing adjustment, and angular momentum regulation. In this paper, we aim at designing a walking pattern generator which employs an optimal combination of these tools to generate robust gaits. In this approach, first, the next step location and timing are decided consistent with the commanded walking velocity and based on the Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) measurement. This stage which is done by a very small-size Quadratic Program (QP) uses the Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (LIPM) dynamics to adapt the switching contact location and time. Then, consistent with the first stage, the LIPM with flywheel dynamics is used to regenerate the DCM and angular momentum trajectories at each control cycle. This is done by modulating the CoP and Centroidal Momentum Pivot (CMP) to realize a desired DCM at the end of current step. Simulation results show the merit of this reactive approach in generating robust and dynamically consistent walking patterns.
Computational Social Scientist Beware: Simpson's Paradox in Behavioral Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends observed in data that has been aggregated over the entire population may be substantially different from those of the underlying subgroups. I illustrate Simpson's paradox with several examples coming from studies of online behavior and show that aggregate response leads to wrong conclusions about the underlying individual behavior. I then present a simple method to test whether Simpson's paradox is affecting results of analysis. The presence of Simpson's paradox in social data suggests that important behavioral differences exist within the population, and failure to take these differences into account can distort the studies' findings.
Implicit Low-Order Unstructured Finite-Element Multiple Simulation Enhanced by Dense Computation using OpenACC
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we develop a low-order three-dimensional finite-element solver for fast multiple-case crust deformation analysis on GPU-based systems. Based on a high-performance solver designed for massively parallel CPU based systems, we modify the algorithm to reduce random data access, and then insert OpenACC directives. The developed solver on ten Reedbush-H nodes (20 P100 GPUs) attained speedup of 14.2 times from 20 K computer nodes, which is high considering the peak memory bandwidth ratio of 11.4 between the two systems. On the newest Volta generation V100 GPUs, the solver attained a further 2.45 times speedup from P100 GPUs. As a demonstrative example, we computed 368 cases of crustal deformation analyses of northeast Japan with 400 million degrees of freedom. The total procedure of algorithm modification and porting implementation took only two weeks; we can see that high performance improvement was achieved with low development cost. With the developed solver, we can expect improvement in reliability of crust-deformation analyses by many-case analyses on a wide range of GPU-based systems.
Tails & Tor and other tools for Safeguarding Online Activities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

There are not many known ways to break Tor anonymity, and they require an enormous amount of computational power. Controlling both entrance and exit nodes allows an attacker to compromise client IP with enough pattern analysis. If an .onion or public website does not use SSL, information will not be encrypted once it reaches the exit node. Tor has been successfully broken by Carnegie Mellon, however they will not answer questions nor confirm their method. This research paper investigates Tails & Tor and other tools for Safeguarding Online Activities.
Nonlinear Predictive Control on a Heterogeneous Computing Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

We propose an implementation of an interior-point-based nonlinear predictive controller on a heterogeneous processor. The workload can be split between a general-purpose CPU and a field-programmable gate array to trade off the contradicting design objectives of control performance and computational resource usage. A new way of exploiting the structure of the KKT matrix yields significant memory savings. We report an 18x memory saving, compared to existing approaches, and a 36x speedup over a software implementation with an ARM Cortex-A9 processor. We also introduce a new release of Protoip, which abstracts low-level details of heterogeneous programming and allows processor-in-the-loop verification.
Automatic Software and Computing Hardware Co-design for Predictive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a computationally demanding control technique that allows dealing with multiple-input and multiple-output systems, while handling constraints in a systematic way. The necessity of solving an optimization problem at every sampling instant often (i) limits the application scope to slow dynamical systems and/or (ii) results in expensive computational hardware implementations. Traditional MPC design is based on manual tuning of software and computational hardware design parameters, which leads to suboptimal implementations. This paper proposes a framework for automating the MPC software and computational hardware co-design, while achieving the optimal trade-off between computational resource usage and controller performance. The proposed approach is based on using a multi-objective optimization algorithm, namely BiMADS. Two test studies are considered: Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementations of fast gradient-based MPC. Numerical experiments show that optimization-based design outperforms Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), a statistical sampling-based design exploration technique.
Adapting Engineering Education to Industrie 4.0 Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2017
Year: 2017

Industrie 4.0 is originally a future vision described in the high-tech strategy of the German government that is conceived upon the information and communication technologies like Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Physical Internet and Internet of Services to achieve a high degree of flexibility in production, higher productivity rates through real-time monitoring and diagnosis, and a lower wastage rate of material in production. An important part of the tasks in the preparation for Industrie 4.0 is the adaption of the higher education to the requirements of this vision, in particular the engineering education. In this work, we introduce a road map consisting of three pillars describing the changes/enhancements to be conducted in the areas of curriculum development, lab concept, and student club activities. We also report our current application of this road map at the Turkish-German University, Istanbul.
GooFit 2.0
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2017
Year: 2017

The GooFit package provides physicists a simple, familiar syntax for manipulating probability density functions and performing fits, and is highly optimized for data analysis on NVIDIA GPUs and multithreaded CPU backends. GooFit was updated to version 2.0, bringing a host of new features. A completely revamped and redesigned build system makes GooFit easier to install, develop with, and run on virtually any system. Unit testing, continuous integration, and advanced logging options are improving the stability and reliability of the system. Developing new PDFs now uses standard CUDA terminology and provides a lower barrier for new users. The system now has built-in support for multiple graphics cards or nodes using MPI, and is being tested on a wide range of different systems. GooFit also has significant improvements in performance on some GPU architectures due to optimized memory access. Support for time-dependent four-body amplitude analyses has also been added.
Synthetic Data for Social Good
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Data for good implies unfettered access to data. But data owners must be conservative about how, when, and why they share data or risk violating the trust of the people they aim to help, losing their funding, or breaking the law. Data sharing agreements can help prevent privacy violations, but require a level of specificity that is premature during preliminary discussions, and can take over a year to establish. We consider the generation and use of synthetic data to facilitate ad hoc collaborations involving sensitive data. A good synthetic dataset has two properties: it is representative of the original data, and it provides strong guarantees about privacy. In this paper, we discuss important use cases for synthetic data that challenge the state of the art in privacy-preserving data generation, and describe DataSynthesizer, a dataset generation tool that takes a sensitive dataset as input and generates a structurally and statistically similar synthetic dataset, with strong privacy guarantees, as output. The data owners need not release their data, while potential collaborators can begin developing models and methods with some confidence that their results will work similarly on the real dataset. The distinguishing feature of DataSynthesizer is its usability - in most cases, the data owner need not specify any parameters to start generating and sharing data safely and effectively. The code implementing DataSynthesizer is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/DataResponsibly. The work on DataSynthesizer is part of the Data, Responsibly project, where the goal is to operationalize responsibility in data sharing, integration, analysis and use.
An Energy-Efficient Mixed-Signal Neuron for Inherently Error-Resilient Neuromorphic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

This work presents the design and analysis of a mixed-signal neuron (MS-N) for convolutional neural networks (CNN) and compares its performance with a digital neuron (Dig-N) in terms of operating frequency, power and noise. The circuit-level implementation of the MS-N in 65 nm CMOS technology exhibits 2-3 orders of magnitude better energy-efficiency over Dig-N for neuromorphic computing applications - especially at low frequencies due to the high leakage currents from many transistors in Dig-N. The inherent error-resiliency of CNN is exploited to handle the thermal and flicker noise of MS-N. A system-level analysis using a cohesive circuit-algorithmic framework on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate an increase of 3% in worst-case classification error for MNIST when the integrated noise power in the bandwidth is ~ 1 μV2.
A New Look at MIMO Capacity in the Millimeter Wave
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we present a new theoretical discovery that the multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) capacity can be influenced by atmosphere molecules. In more detail, some common atmosphere molecules, such as Oxygen and water, can absorb and re-radiate energy in their natural resonance frequencies, such as 60GHz, 120GHz, and 180GHz, which belong to the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum. Such phenomenon can provide equivalent non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths in an environment that lacks scatterers, and thus greatly improve the spatial multiplexing and diversity of a MIMO system. This kind of performance improvement is particularly useful for most mmWave communications that heavily rely on line-of-sight (LoS) transmissions. To sum up, our study concludes that since the molecular re-radiation happens at certain mmWave frequency bands, the MIMO capacity becomes highly frequency selective and enjoys a considerable boosting at those mmWave frequency bands. The impact of our new discovery is significant, which fundamentally changes our understanding on the relationship between the MIMO capacity and the frequency spectrum. In particular, our results predict that several mmWave bands can serve as valuable spectrum windows for high-efficiency MIMO communications, which in turn may shift the paradigm of research, standardization, and implementation in the field of mmWave communications.
Energy Management for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensors with Adaptive Retransmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper analyzes the communication between two energy harvesting wireless sensor nodes. The nodes use automatic repeat request and forward error correction mechanism for the error control. The random nature of available energy and arrivals of harvested energy may induce interruption to the signal sampling and decoding operations. We propose a selective sampling scheme where the length of the transmitted packet to be sampled depends on the available energy at the receiver. The receiver performs the decoding when complete samples of the packet are available. The selective sampling information bits are piggybacked on the automatic repeat request messages for the transmitter use. This way, the receiver node manages more efficiently its energy use. Besides, we present the partially observable Markov decision process formulation, which minimizes the long-term average pairwise error probability and optimizes the transmit power. Optimal and suboptimal power assignment strategies are introduced for retransmissions, which are adapted to the selective sampling and channel state information. With finite battery size and fixed power assignment policy, an analytical expression for the average packet drop probability is derived. Numerical simulations show the performance gain of the proposed scheme with power assignment strategy over the conventional scheme.
A Pattern Language for High-Performance Computing Resilience
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

High-performance computing systems (HPC) provide powerful capabilities for modeling, simulation, and data analytics for a broad class of computational problems. They enable extreme performance of the order of quadrillion floating-point arithmetic calculations per second by aggregating the power of millions of compute, memory, networking and storage components. With the rapidly growing scale and complexity of HPC systems for achieving even greater performance, ensuring their reliable operation in the face of system degradations and failures is a critical challenge. System fault events often lead the scientific applications to produce incorrect results, or may even cause their untimely termination. The sheer number of components in modern extreme-scale HPC systems and the complex interactions and dependencies among the hardware and software components, the applications, and the physical environment makes the design of practical solutions that support fault resilience a complex undertaking. To manage this complexity, we developed a methodology for designing HPC resilience solutions using design patterns. We codified the well-known techniques for handling faults, errors and failures that have been devised, applied and improved upon over the past three decades in the form of design patterns. In this paper, we present a pattern language to enable a structured approach to the development of HPC resilience solutions. The pattern language reveals the relations among the resilience patterns and provides the means to explore alternative techniques for handling a specific fault model that may have different efficiency and complexity characteristics. Using the pattern language enables the design and implementation of comprehensive resilience solutions as a set of interconnected resilience patterns that can be instantiated across layers of the system stack.
Linking Tweets with Monolingual and Cross-Lingual News using Transformed Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Social media platforms have grown into an important medium to spread information about an event published by the traditional media, such as news articles. Grouping such diverse sources of information that discuss the same topic in varied perspectives provide new insights. But the gap in word usage between informal social media content such as tweets and diligently written content (e.g. news articles) make such assembling difficult. In this paper, we propose a transformation framework to bridge the word usage gap between tweets and online news articles across languages by leveraging their word embeddings. Using our framework, word embeddings extracted from tweets and news articles are aligned closer to each other across languages, thus facilitating the identification of similarity between news articles and tweets. Experimental results show a notable improvement over baselines for monolingual tweets and news articles comparison, while new findings are reported for cross-lingual comparison.
SD-WISE: A Software-Defined WIreless SEnsor network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

SD-WISE is a complete software-defined solution for wireless sensor (and actuator) networks (WSNs). SD-WISE has several unique features making it a flexible and expandable solution that can be applied in heterogeneous application domains. Its fundamental feature is that it provides software abstractions of the nodes' resources on both the controller and the nodes sides. By leveraging these abstractions, SD-WISE (i) extends the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach to WSNs, introducing a more flexible way to define flows as well as the possibility to control the duty cycles of the node radios to increase energy efficiency; (ii) enables network function virtualization (NFV) in WSNs; (iii) leverages the tight interplay between trusted hardware and software to support regulation compliant behavior of sensor nodes. In this paper SD-WISE is introduced, its major operations are described, and its features are demonstrated in three relevant scenarios, thus assessing the effectiveness of the approach.
Early identification of important patents through network centrality
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

One of the most challenging problems in technological forecasting is to identify as early as possible those technologies that have the potential to lead to radical changes in our society. In this paper, we use the US patent citation network (1926-2010) to test our ability to early identify a list of historically significant patents through citation network analysis. We show that in order to effectively uncover these patents shortly after they are issued, we need to go beyond raw citation counts and take into account both the citation network topology and temporal information. In particular, an age-normalized measure of patent centrality, called rescaled PageRank, allows us to identify the significant patents earlier than citation count and PageRank score. In addition, we find that while high-impact patents tend to rely on other high-impact patents in a similar way as scientific papers, the patents' citation dynamics is significantly slower than that of papers, which makes the early identification of significant patents more challenging than that of significant papers.
Supervised Classification: Quite a Brief Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

The original problem of supervised classification considers the task of automatically assigning objects to their respective classes on the basis of numerical measurements derived from these objects. Classifiers are the tools that implement the actual functional mapping from these measurements---also called features or inputs---to the so-called class label---or output. The fields of pattern recognition and machine learning study ways of constructing such classifiers. The main idea behind supervised methods is that of learning from examples: given a number of example input-output relations, to what extent can the general mapping be learned that takes any new and unseen feature vector to its correct class? This chapter provides a basic introduction to the underlying ideas of how to come to a supervised classification problem. In addition, it provides an overview of some specific classification techniques, delves into the issues of object representation and classifier evaluation, and (very) briefly covers some variations on the basic supervised classification task that may also be of interest to the practitioner.
SOPE: A Spatial Order Preserving Encryption Model for Multi-dimensional Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2017
Year: 2017

Due to the increasing demand for cloud services and the threat of privacy invasion, the user is suggested to encrypt the data before it is outsourced to the remote server. The safe storage and efficient retrieval of d-dimensional data on an untrusted server has therefore crucial importance. The paper proposes a new encryption model which offers spatial order-preservation for d-dimensional data (SOPE model). The paper studies the operations for the construction of the encrypted database and suggests algorithms that exploit unique properties that this new model offers for the efficient execution of a whole range of well-known queries over the encrypted d-dimensional data. The new model utilizes well-known database indices, such as the B+-tree and the R-tree, as backbone structures in their traditional form, as it suggests no modifications to them for loading the data and for the efficient execution of the supporting query algorithms. An extensive experimental study that is also presented in the paper indicates the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed encryption model for real-life d-dimensional data applications.
Knowledge Projection for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

While deeper and wider neural networks are actively pushing the performance limits of various computer vision and machine learning tasks, they often require large sets of labeled data for effective training and suffer from extremely high computational complexity. In this paper, we will develop a new framework for training deep neural networks on datasets with limited labeled samples using cross-network knowledge projection which is able to improve the network performance while reducing the overall computational complexity significantly. Specifically, a large pre-trained teacher network is used to observe samples from the training data. A projection matrix is learned to project this teacher-level knowledge and its visual representations from an intermediate layer of the teacher network to an intermediate layer of a thinner and faster student network to guide and regulate its training process. Both the intermediate layers from the teacher network and the injection layers from the student network are adaptively selected during training by evaluating a joint loss function in an iterative manner. This knowledge projection framework allows us to use crucial knowledge learned by large networks to guide the training of thinner student networks, avoiding over-fitting, achieving better network performance, and significantly reducing the complexity. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets have demonstrated that our proposed knowledge projection approach outperforms existing methods, improving accuracy by up to 4% while reducing network complexity by 4 to 10 times, which is very attractive for practical applications of deep neural networks.